Alan Siu's Blog

Tag: mac

  • How to install macOS 12 (Monterey) as a VMware Fusion guest VM

    Notes These are just more fleshed out steps from a brief overview in the VMware Fusion communities online forums. Hopefully, these instructions will be obsolete soon in a future update of VMware Fusion (where you can just select macOS 12, drag the installer to the install wizard, and have VMware Fusion do everything for you).…

  • Troubleshooting “zsh: operation not permitted”

    If you try to run a script from the Terminal in macOS, you may get an error that says zsh: operation not permitted. As of this writing, the top Google search results for that all point to needing to grant the Terminal full disk access (either via System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy…

  • Updating Zoom manually if you’re using the Zoom IT installer

    What’s the issue? Many Mac admins use the Zoom IT installer to keep Zoom up to date, because it can actually be installed in the background. But if you (as a Mac admin) install the Zoom IT version and don’t immediately update to the latest Zoom version, your users will encounter a Your Zoom application…

  • If you can log in and use sudo but can’t unlock Sys Pref prefpanes in Big Sur

    I and at least one other person on the MacAdmins Slack saw situations in which a known working password (can log into the computer, can use sudo to escalate privileges in the terminal) on an admin account is not working in System Preferences to unlock a prefpane. Special thanks to owen on the MacAdmins Slack…

  • Installing Rosetta 2 on M1 Apple Silicon Macs (why checks matter)

    Actual guides This isn’t really a guide to how to install Rosetta 2. There are already much better guides for those: Rich Trouton’s Installing Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs Graham Gilbert’s Installing Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs Rich Trouton’s blog post has some checks to make sure the Mac is running at least…

  • Double-checking details of deployed PPPC/TCC profile from MDM

    If you’ve deployed a PPPC/TCC profile from your user-approved MDM to a Mac, and you see the profile in System Preferences > Profiles, you can also verify all the details of the deployed profile on the Mac itself by going to /Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/MDMOverrides.plist (which is an SIP-protected directory, by the way).

  • How to deploy a .pkg via Munki if a config file has to be in the same directory

    Vendors package software in funny ways sometimes. Every now and then, you might come across a vendor .pkg that comes with some kind of .xml or .cfg or .txt that has to be in the same directory as the .pkg. It’s likely because there’s some postinstall script in the .pkg itself that references that text…

  • Some basics of DEPNotify and a sample script

    If you’ve been doing Munki admin’ing for a short while, you’ve probably heard people talk about DEPNotify, whose README says is “a small light weight notification app that was designed to let your users know what’s going on during a DEP enrollment.” Aforementioned DEPNotify README is fairly comprehensive in terms of going over all the…

  • Fixing DEPNotify GUI not launching with keyPath error

    I’m not sure how my computer got into this funky state, but I was playing around with a DEPNotify script, and after a while, I was suddenly getting these errors every time I tried to run it: DEPNotify[12422:409983] Failed to set (keyPath) user defined inspected property on (DEPNotify.WindowController): [ setValue:forUndefinedKey:]: this class is not key…

  • MathType formulas shrink after editing and saving them in Microsoft Word

    March 2019 Update: WIRIS has now announced a workaround for randomly resized equations. I don’t know for sure that that’s exactly the same problem as the shrinking formulas, but it could be. Definitely worth checking out if you’re experiencing this issue. One teacher had an issue in MathType that involved saved formulas in a Word…

  • Using Santa to block an .app

    Acknowledgements Special shoutout to @bur on the Mac Admins Slack for help with some command-line syntax. Santa can be complicated, but doesn’t need to be Google has a project on GitHub called Santa, which is quite powerful and complicated. As the project’s readme says, though: Documentation: This is currently limited.. I just wanted to do…

  • If munkiimport doesn’t generate an installer_item_hash in the pkginfo file

    If you notice that running munkiimport on a .dmg doesn’t result in an installer_item_hash generating, you might want to also run makepkginfo on that .dmg to double-check it’s read-only: makepkginfo /PATH/TO/REPO/pkgs/PROBLEMITEM.dmg WARNING: /PATH/TO/REPO/pkgs/PROBLEMITEM.dmg is a writable disk image. Checksum verification is not supported. WARNING: Consider converting /PATH/TO/REPO/pkgs/PROBLEMITEM.dmg to a read-only diskimage.

  • “Grant access” problem when trying to open Word docs

    If you’re trying to open a Word doc, and it keeps saying you don’t have permission (even when you own the document), asking you to grant access to the document, and then still not giving you access; then just quit out of Word completely, and then launch it up again. The document should open fine…

  • Chrome Gmail unread messages not appearing in bold

    We had a user whose unread emails were appearing as bold in Safari (with an ugly font) and not bold at all in Chrome (font looked okay), and we did some digging and found the solution was to enable the Arial Bold font in Font Book on the user’s Mac, and it was all good.…

  • Use the command-line to set a firmware password on macOS

    For extra security, you can add a firmware password to Macs, especially since Find My Mac is essentially useless (unlike for iPads, which have an activation lock preventing thieves from reactivating the iPad after a factory reset) and DEP-to-MDM enrollments for Macs can even be avoided by thieves if they’re resourceful enough. If you have…